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Friday, April 17, 2015

A Song of ICEbreakers and Firewalls - (Our Workstation Asploded!!!)

A Song of ICEbreakers and Firewalls (Neofeud Recap, E01S01)

Citizens of Coastlandia, Silverspook Games bannermen... I hate to be the three-eyed raven bearer of terrible news, but... My trusty indie-game-dev steed, my Windows 7 Dell Lattitude e5510 and possibly-maybe work laptop just went utter AWOL. All the King's safemodes and all the King's BIOS settings, can't put Humpty together again...

I have, however, at Wired and Lord Larry Page's behest, "migrated to Cloud Country", to some extent. I have a Google Drive backup zip from a week ago of the Neofeud edifice, including game logic, level matrices, spritework etc. I also have most of the art offlined in a Thumb-vault, canted between my Bitcoin Wallet prepper-nestegg and my scanned W2 tax forms for the past decade. I keep my Van Goghs, Hirsts, and K. Bryants (our virtuoso concept artist), all those invaluable pocket-retirement funds sealed up tight against the data looters and bit-rot zombies.

Neofeud hath suffered a blow, not unlike the Wildlings with the death of ***** ******* in S01E01 of Game of Thrones that my wife and I just finished watching as a cheer-me-up. A most hit-point-decimating magic missile-to-the-laptop.

(Artist's rendering of me after 8 straight Rockstar-powered hours of Dell driver-questing, hacking away at SATA configs, and generally being my own geek squad. Also an in-game screenshot of Neofeud.)

But Silverspook Games' Library of Alexandria survives! the Arthurian Quest For the point-n-click holy grail, the epitome of Retro-Adventure Game Perfection continues on! Neofeudalism prevails!

(Artist's rendering of Neofeud Masthead, manifested as a Commodore-64 arcade box, played by young John Connor in Terminator 2 circa 1988)

Now I return to my regularly scheduled Westeros heroin-withdrawal, until next Sunday (or next io9 or Gawker reviewer with questionable conscience auctions leaked episodes 5-8 to the highest Pirate Proxy bidder.)

(Screencap of Neofeud prevailing through the fire and flames of computer FUBAR.) Three parallel versions of Win 7, valiant slaying of Win Update, and resurrection of a WD hard drive later, and I've since completely restored the laptop. Thus we continue our ascent to the annals of adventure gaming glory.

P.S.: Fun fact! Neofeud was in fact originally inspired by spin-off roleplays of the Game of Thrones world that Mrs. Spook and I nursed our addictions on, between episodes of GoT. The concept was "Feudal real politiks in a cyberpunk setting". Things have evolved, but the core concept remains.